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Film Review: The Jazz Singer (dir by Richard Fleischer)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In the 1980 remake of The Jazz Singer, it only takes the film seven minutes to find an excuse to put Neil Diamond in blackface.

Of course, the film was a remake of the 1927 version of The Jazz Singer, which featured several scenes of Al Jolson performing in blackface.  In fact, Al Jolson in blackface was such a key part of the film that it was even the image that was used to advertise the film when it was first released.  Back in the 20s, Jolson said that wearing blackface was a way of honoring the black artists who created jazz.  (As shocking as the image of Al Jolson wearing blackface is to modern sensibilities, Jolson was considered a strong advocate for civil rights and one of the few white singers to regularly appear on stage with black musicians.)  Regardless of Jolson’s motives, less-progressively minded performers used blackface as a way to reinforce racial stereotypes and, to modern audiences, blackface is an abhorrent reminder of how black people were marginalized by a racist culture.  You would think that, if there was any element of the original film that a remake would change, it would be the lead character performing in blackface.

But nope.  Seven minutes into the remake, songwriter Jess Robin (Neil Diamond) puts on a fake afro and dons blackface so that he can perform on stage at a black club with the group that is performing his songs.  The group’s name is the Four Brothers and, unfortunately, one of the Brothers was arrested the day of the performance.  Jess performs with the group and the crowd loves it until they see his white hands.  Ernie Hudson — yes, Ernie Hudson — stands up and yells, “That’s a white boy!”  A riot breaks out.  The police show up.  Jess and the three remaining Brothers are arrested and taken to jail.  Jess is eventually bailed out by his father, Cantor Rabinovitch (Laurence Olivier).  The Cantor is shocked to discover that his son, Yussel Rabinovitch, has been performing under the name Jess Robin.  He’s also stunned to learn that Yussel doesn’t want to be a cantor like his father.  Instead, he wants to write and perform modern music.  The Cantor tells Yussel that his voice is God’s instrument, not his own.  Yussel returns home to his wife, Rivka (Caitlin Adams), and tries to put aside his dreams.

But when a recording artist named Keith Lennox (Paul Nicholas) wants to record one Yussel’s songs, Yussel flies out to Los Angeles.  As Jess Robin, he is shocked to discover that Lennox wants to turn a ballad that he wrote into a hard rock number,  Jess sings the song to show Lennox how it should sound.  The arrogant Lennox is not impressed but his agent, Molly (Lucie Arnaz) is.  Soon, Jess has a chance to become a star but what about the family he left behind in New York?  “I have no son!” the Cantor wails when he learns about Jess’s new life in California.

I’ve often seen the 1980 version of The Jazz Singer referred to as being one of the worst films of all time.  I watched it a few days ago and I wouldn’t go that far.  It’s not really terrible as much as its just kind of bland.  For someone who has had as long and successful a career as Neil Diamond, he gives a surprisingly charisma-free performance in the lead role.  The most memorable thing about Diamond’s performance is that he refuses to maintain eye contact with any of the other performers, which makes Jess seem like kind of a sullen brat.  It also doesn’t help that Diamond appears to be in his 40s in this film, playing a role that was clearly written for a much younger artist.  Still, when it comes to bad acting, no one can beat a very miscast Laurence Olivier, delivering his lines with an overdone Yiddish accent and dramatically tearing at his clothes to indicate that Yussel is dead to him.  Olivier was neither Jewish nor a New Yorker and that becomes very clear the more one watches this film.  It takes a truly great actor to give a performance this bad.  Diamond, at least, could point to the fact that he was a nonactor given a starring role in a major studio production.  Olivier, on the other hand, really had no one to blame but himself.

Still, I have to admit that ending the film with a sparkly Neil Diamond performing America while Laurence Olivier nods in the audience was perhaps the best possible way to bring this film to a close.  It’s a moment of beautiful kitsch.  The Jazz Singer needed more of that.

Smokey And The Good Time Outlaws (1978, directed by Alexander Grasshoff)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

After meeting a talent agent while spending a night in jail, aspiring singer J.D. (Jesse Turner) and his best friend, The Salt Flat Kid (Dennis Fimple), decide to leave Texas for Nashville.  J.D. wants to be a star and the Salt Flat Kid is a ventriloquist who doesn’t go anywhere without his dummy.

On the way to the Grand Old Opry, they pick up two women (Dianne Sherrill and Marcia Barkin), one of whom was engaged to marry the idiot nephew (Gailard Sartain) of Nashville’s Sheriff Leddy (Slim Pickens).  The sheriff sets out after the two men, planning on sending them back to Texas.

Despite the title and the subplot about the sheriff searching for his nephew’s former future wife, Smokey and the Good Time Outlaws doesn’t have much in common with Smokey and the Bandit.  J.D. has a Burt Reynolds-style mustache but he’s not a bandit.  He is just someone who wants to be a star and most of the movie is about him and the Salt Flat Kid tying to make their way onto the stage of the Grand Old Opry.  Helping them out is an eccentric woman named Marcie (who is played by Hope Summers, who older viewers will immediately recognize as having been Clara Edwards on The Andy Griffith Show).  When J.D. can’t get an audition, it occurs to him to just rush out on stage and start performing.

This film was a dream project for Jesse Turner, who was a real-life country musician.  He co-wrote and produced the film, as well as starred in it.  Jesse Turner wasn’t much of an actor but he’s surrounded by a good supporting cast.  Slim Pickens steals the show as a more menacing version of Buford T. Justice but he’s not in the film nearly enough.  Dennis Fimple is likable but appears to be too old to be known as “the Kid.”  You can tell this is a movie because no one is creeped out by the Kid’s ventriloquist dummy.

Smokey and the Good Time Outlaws was made for the Southern drive-in circuit and it is good-natured, even if the story is never that interesting.  Country music fans of a certain age will appreciate it.

Lisa Reviews An Oscar Nominee: Prizzi’s Honor (dir by John Huston)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

First released in 1985, Prizzi’s Honor tells the story of Charley Partanna (Jack Nicholson), a blue collar guy who lives in Brooklyn and who is a hard-working hit man for the Prizzi crime family.  Charley is the son of Angelo (John Randolph), who is the right-hand man to the family’s elderly but still ruthless Don (William Hickey).  In the past, Charley came close to marrying the Don’s daughter, Maerose Prizzi (Anjelica Huston), and he is almost as much a member of the family as the Don’s two sons, Eduardo (Robert Loggia) and Dominic (Lee Richardson).

While attending a family wedding, Charley meets and is immediately infatuated with a woman named Irene Walker (Kathleen Turner).  Later, when Charley is sent to California to kill a man who robbed one of the family’s Vegas casinos, he is shocked to discover that the man is Irene’s husband.  Irene swears that she didn’t have anything to do with the casino theft and, after a whirlwind courtship, Charley and Irene get married in Mexico.  What Charley doesn’t know (but eventually discovers) is that Irene is herself a professional killer.  While Charley and Irene try to balance work and love, Maerose conspires to turn the family against Irene and win Charley back.

Directed by the legendary John Huston, Prizzi’s Honor is pitch black comedy about two hard-working people who kill for a living.  (The film’s big set piece is an extended sequence in which Charley and Irene’s attempt to pull a job together goes wrong in every way and they end up arguing about their relationship while dragging dead bodies from one room to another.)  Though Prizzi’s Honor was released long before the series premiered on HBO, the film feels almost like a companion piece to The Sopranos, full of mobsters who are not as clever as they think they are and who struggle to uphold the old ways in an increasingly complicated world.  Particularly when compared to the gangster who populate a film like The Godfather, the Prizzis are defined by their pettiness.  If Don Corleone epitomized wisdom and honor, Don Prizzi epitomizes someone who holds onto power solely for power’s sake.

Prizzi’s Honor is one of those films that probably seemed a bit more revolutionary when it was first released than it does today.  At this point, we’ve seen so many films about hired killers who have quirky conversations while carrying out their work that the mix of violence and dark humor can feel almost like a cliché.  As well, there are certain parts of the film, like the opening wedding sequence, that feel as if they go on for just a few minutes too long, as if John Huston himself was not always comfortable with the balance between the dark drama and the comedy of mob manners.  That said, Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Turner (who gives a performance worthy of the great femme fatales of film noir), Anjelica Huston, John Randolph, and especially William Hickey all give strong enough performances to hold the audience’s attention and the film’s finale cuts to the point in such a way that it leaves you reconsidering everything that you’ve previously seen.  Prizzi’s Honor has its flaws but Nicholson and Turner have such chemistry that the film’s ending sticks with you.

Prizzi’s Honor was nominated for 8 Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Supporting Actor for William Hickey.  (Oddly, Kathleen Turner was not nominated for playing Irene.)  In the end, it only won one Oscar that year, for supporting actress Anjelica Huston.  The Oscars that year were dominated by a far more convention love story, Out of Africa.

Film Review: The Panic In The Needle Park (dir by Jerry Schatzberg)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1971 The Panic in Needle Park tells the story of two young lover in New York City.

Helen (Kitty Winn) is an innocent runaway from Indiana who, when we first meet her, has just had a back alley abortion.  Her boyfriend, Marco (Raul Julia), doesn’t seem to be too concerned about her or anyone else for that matter.  Instead, it’s Marco’s dealer, Bobby (Al Pacino), who checks in on Helen and who visits her when she eventually ends up in the hospital.  It’s also Bobby who gives her a place to stay after she gets out of the hospital.

Bobby is a small-time dealer.  He’s not book smart but he knows how to survive on the streets and it’s hard not to be charmed by him.  He literally never stop talking.  As he explains it to Helen, he’s been in jail 8 times but he’s not a bad guy.  His brother, Hank (Richard Bright, who also co-starred with Pacino in The Godfather films), is a burglar and he legitimately is a bad guy but he and Bobby seem to have a close relationship.  Bobby also swears that he’s not a drug addict.  He just occasionally indulges.  It doesn’t take long to discover that Bobby isn’t being completely honest with either Helen or himself.

Together, Bobby and Helen ….

Well, they don’t solve crimes.  In fact, they really don’t do much of anything.  That’s kind of the problem with movies about drug addicts.  For the most part, drug addicts are boring people and there’s only so many times that you can watch someone shoot up before you lose interest.  Heroin may make the addicts feel alive but, with a few notable exception (Trainspotting comes to mind), it’s always been a bit of a cinematic dead end.  The film takes a documentary approach to Bobby and Helen’s descent into addiction and it’s not exactly the most thrilling thing to watch.

Bobby and Helen live in an area of New York that’s known as needle park, largely due to the fact that it’s full of addicts.  It’s a place where people sit on street corners and nod off and where everyone’s life is apparently fueled by petty crime.  An unlikable narcotics detective (Alan Vint) occasionally walks through the area and tries to talk everyone into betraying everyone else.  It turns out that being a drug addict is not like being in the mafia.  Everyone expects you to betray everyone else.

As I said, it’s a bit of a drag to watch but you do end up caring about Bobby and Helen.  They come across as being two essentially decent people who have gotten caught up in a terrible situation.  Even when they piss you off, you still feel badly for them because you know that they’ve surrendered control of their lives to their addictions.  It helps that they’re played by two very appealing actors.  This was only Al Pacino’s second film and his first starring role but he commands the screen like a junkie James Cagney.  Meanwhile, making her film debut, Kitty Winn gives a sympathetic and likable performance as Helen.  You watch Winn’s vulnerably sincere performance and you understand why Helen would have looked for safety with undeserving losers like Marco and Bobby and, as a result, you don’t hold it against her that she seems to be addicted not just to heroin but also to falling for the wrong men.  Helen does a lot of stupid things but you keep hoping that she’ll somehow manage to survive living in needle park.

Pacino, of course, followed-up The Panic In Needle Park with The Godfather.  As for Kitty Win, she won best actress at Cannes but the role didn’t lead to the stardom that it probably should have.  Her best-known role remains playing the nanny in The Exorcist.

Cleaning Out The DVR: Just The Ticket (dir by Richard Wenk)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

(Hi there!  So, as you may know because I’ve been talking about it on this site all year, I have got way too much stuff on my DVR.  Seriously, I currently have 193 things recorded!  I’ve decided that, on January 15th, I am going to erase everything on the DVR, regardless of whether I’ve watched it or not.  So, that means that I’ve now have only have a month to clean out the DVR!  Will I make it?  Keep checking this site to find out!  I recorded the 1999 romantic comedy Just The Ticket off of Epix on October 13th!)

Just The Ticket tells the story of Gary Starke (Andy Garcia).

Gary lives in New York City.  He is a tough, streetwise character, loyal to his friends and quick to anger if he feels that anyone is trying to take advantage of him.  He has no time for pretentious posturing or snobbish social gatherings.  Gary’s a man of the people.  He works with and takes care of an aging former boxer named Benny (Richard Bradford).  He looks after a pregnant, former drug addict named Alice (Laura Harris).  When the slick and dangerous Casino (Andre B. Blake) starts to do business in Gary’s territory, Gary is the only person with the guts to stand up to him.  Having never had a family (he’s never even seen his birth certificate and has no idea who his parents were), Gary has adopted the street people as his surrogate family.

That’s not all.  Gary is also a lapsed Catholic who, when he goes to confession, opens by saying that it’s been 25 years since his last confession and that he’s taken the Lord’s name in vain 20 to 30 times that morning.  Gary needs some help because his girlfriend, an aspiring chef named Linda (Andie McDowell), has left him and Gary wants to win her back.  The priest asks Gary if he can get him tickets to see the Knicks…

Why does he ask that?

You see, Gary is a legendary ticket scalper and…

Okay, I probably just lost you when I used the terms “legendary” and “ticket scalper” in the same sentence.  And I’ll admit that, when I discovered this movie was about ticket scalpers, it nearly lost me as well.  Just The Ticket treats ticket scalping with a dignity and reverence that I’m not quite sure it deserves.  I wasn’t surprised to discover that director/writer Richard Wenk apparently based the character of Gary on an actual ticket scalper that he knew.  A lot of bad movies have been made as the result of a director, writer, or producer coming across some mundane activity and thinking, “Wow, this would make a great movie!”

(That’s one reason why, every few years, we suddenly get a dozen movies about race car drivers.)

However, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Just The Ticket is not a terrible movie.  Admittedly, it’s totally predictable and there are a lot of scenes that don’t work.  For instance, there’s a lengthy scene where Gary and Linda destroy a snobbish food critic’s kitchen.  I could imagine Gary doing that because he has nothing to lose.  But Linda is actually hoping to become a chef in New York City.  Would she really run the risk of making a permanent enemy at the New York Times?  There’s nothing about Andie McDowell’s performance that suggests she would.  The scenes between Gary and his aging partner also tend to overplay their hand.  Richard Bradford gives a good performance as Benny but we all know what’s going to end up happening to him as soon as he starts crying after Gary insults him.

With all that in mind, Just The Ticket still has an undeniable charm.  Some of it is due to Andy Garcia’s dedicated performance.  He is frequently better than the material and he and Andie McDowell have enough chemistry that you do want to see Linda and Gary get back together.  Some of it is because Just The Ticket is not afraid to shy away from being sentimental.  It’s hard to think of any other romantic comedy in which the Pope plays such an important supporting role.  It’s a sweet movie.  It has a good heart.

There’s something to be said for that.

Shattered Politics #48: The Kidnapping of the President (dir by George Mendeluk)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Kidnapping_of_the_president

Agency was not the only Canadian film to be made about American politics in 1980.  There was also The Kidnapping of the President, a low-budget political thriller that, because it has since slipped into the public domain, can currently be found in a few dozen DVD box sets.  In fact, you may very well own a copy of The Kidnapping of the President without even realizing it!

Don’t worry if you do.  The Kidnapping of the President is a fairly harmless little film.

U.S. President Adam Scott (Hal Holbrook) is visiting Toronto when he gets handcuffed to a South American revolutionary named Roberto Assanti (Miguel Fernandes).  Assanti locks President Scott in an armored car that is wired with explosives and then demands a hundred million in diamonds and two planes.  (Though the film never explicitly states it, I imagine that Assanti was primarily motivated by jealousy over the fact that Che is on a million t-shirts while Assanti remains fairly unknown.)  It’s up to secret service agent Jerry O’Connor (William Shatner) to negotiate with Assanti and rescue the President!  Meanwhile, the ethically compromised Vice President (Van Johnson) is left as acting President in Washington and struggles to keep things calm while his ambitious wife (Ava Gardner) plots for a brighter future.

Overall, the Kidnapping of the President is okay for what it is.  It’s neither exceptionally good nor memorably bad.  It just sort of is.  Hal Holbrook is always well-cast as a President and William Shatner gives a typical Shatner performance, which is either a good or a bad thing depending on how you feel about William Shatner.  And, for that matter, Miguel Fernandes is a properly unlikable villain though he never really seems to have the charisma necessary to make him believable as the dynamic leader that he’s supposed to be.

Probably the most interesting thing about The Kidnapping of the President is that it doesn’t try to pass Montreal off for being a location in the United States.  Instead, the film was not only filmed in but is actually set in Toronto as well.  When Jerry attempts to deal with the local authorities, that means that he ends up talking to a bunch of very polite men in red uniforms.

But what’s strange about this is that the people of Toronto are so excited about the arrival of the President.  You half expect to hear one extra say, “I never thought I’d live long enough to see the day that a leader that I can’t vote for and who has next to nothing to do with my everyday life would come to visit Toronto.”

Don’t get me wrong.  If you follow me on twitter, then you know that I am unashamed to declare my love for all things Canadian.  And obviously, as neighbors, Canada and the United States do have a close relationship.  But would people in Toronto really be that excited to see the President?

If so, I think we really owe the people of Canada an apology for not knowing more about their government.  At the very least, we should definitely invite Stephen Harper over for lunch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqyWEPkdxn4